she'd knotted and began measuring it against the boots. In the very bottom of the second box she searched, she found a pair made of thinner leather than usual for work boots. The sole was made for walking miles on roads or forest trails, rather than tromping through the mud of a farmer's field. Her fingers lingered on the decorative stitches on the top edge, hesitating where the right boot was stained with blood - though someone had obviously worked to clean it away. Traveler's boots.
She didn't compare them to her son's feet, just set them back in the box and piled a dozen pairs of other boots on top of them, as if covering them would let her forget about them. In a third bin, she found what she was looking for, and took a sturdy pair of boots up to the front.
There is nothing I could have done, she told herself. I am not a Traveler and have not been for years.
But even knowing it was true, she couldn't help the tug of guilt that tried to tell her differently: to tell her that her place had never been here, safe in Tier's little village, but out in the world protecting those who couldn't protect themselves.
"I can't sell those here," she heard Willon say to a stranger at the front counter - a tinker by the color of his packs. "Folk 'round here get upset with writing they can't read - old traps of the Shadowed still linger in these mountains. They know to fear magic, and even a stupid person's going to notice that those have Traveler's marks on them."
"I bought them from a man in Korhadan. He claimed to have collected them all," said the tinker. "I paid him two silvers. I've had to carry them from there to here. I'll sell them for ten coppers, the entire bag, sir, for I'm that tired of them. You're the eighth merchant in as many towns as told me the same thing, and they take up space in my packs as I might use for something else. You surely could melt them down for something useful."
On the counter lay an assortment of objects that appeared something like metal feathers. One end was sharp for a few inches, almost daggerlike, but the other end was decorative and lacy. Some were short, but most were as long as Seraph's forearm, and one nearly twice that long. There must have been nearly a hundred of them - mermori.
"My son can work metal," said Seraph, around the pulse of sorrow that beat too heavily in her throat. There were so many of them. "He could turn these into horseshoes. I can pay you six coppers."
"Done," cried the fellow before Willon could say a thing. He bundled them up in a worn leather bag and handed it to Seraph, taking the coins she handed him.
He gathered his packs together and carried them off as if he were afraid she'd renege if he waited.
Willon shook his head, "You shouldn't have bought those, Seraph Tieraganswife. Poor luck follows those who buy goods gotten by banditry and murder the way those probably were."
A merchant to the bone, Willon should have objected to her buying outright from the tinker rather than cut him in for a percentage - but things like that happened when mermori were involved.
"Travelers' spells don't hurt those of Traveler blood," she said in a low voice that wouldn't carry to others in the store.
Willon looked startled for a moment. "Ah. Yes, I had almost forgotten that."
"So you think these were gotten by banditry?" she asked.
"My sons tell me that they don't call it that anymore." Willon shook his head in disapproval. "The present emperor's father declared the Travelers beyond the protection of his laws. The old man's been dead for years, but his son's not going to change anything. He shuts himself up in the palace and listens to people who tell him stories without questioning the truth from falsehood, poor boy."
He spoke as if he knew him, but Seraph let it pass without comment. Tier had told her that he thought that the caravanning business Willon had retired from had been richer than he let on. He hadn't changed much from when he'd first come, other than the gradual lightening of his hair to white. Though he must have been nearing his seventh decade, he looked much younger than that.
"Ah well," she said. "They're pretty enough, but they'll make shoes for horses